


Stray

by embroiderama



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Cats, Gen, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ellen watches Dean come and watches him go</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stray

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in the universe of [](http://ellipsisblack.livejournal.com/profile)[**ellipsisblack**](http://ellipsisblack.livejournal.com/)'s amazing [The Company of Cats](http://conquest.livejournal.com/18183.html). Thank you for permission to play in your sandbox! Thank you to [](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/profile)[**elanurel**](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/) for the quick beta!

She hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Winchester boys for over a year when that familiar old Chevy pulled up in front of the roadhouse. They still hadn't come inside by the time she finished an inventory of the beer, so she took a walk outside just to see what was going on. Soon as she saw that empty passenger seat, saw the hollowed-out eyes in Dean Winchester's face, she knew she didn't need to ask where Sam was. She knew that boy was in the ground, sure as she knew her own name.

Dean just looked up at her, didn't say a word. She tipped her head at the empty space beside him. "How long?"

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out, his words trailing out at the end of his breath. "Year. Little more."

"Jesus. You want to come on inside?"

Dean nodded, pushed up out of the car like it was work, and she saw that more had changed about him than his face. His body looked soft, missing the hard layer of muscle that had stretched right under his skin, and he was pale, like he'd been spending a lot of time inside.

She grabbed his duffle bag when he popped the trunk and started him off toward the front door with one hand on his back. "Where've you been?"

"Indiana," he husked out. "State hospital." Which was about what she'd been expecting.

She put him in the back room, and he settled in like he'd had a taste of staying in one place for a while and didn't intend to ever move again. He woke up a little over the first week or two, lost some of the dead look in his eyes, but what replaced it wasn't any better.

He spent his days staring up at the water-stained ceiling and eating a whole lot of nothing until his softness turned thin. His nights passed in a dark corner of the bar where he'd nurse one warm beer for hours and go so still that she wondered if he wasn't sleeping there in the middle of all the jukebox music and the clatter of balls on the pool table.

One night she saw another hunter sitting at the table with Dean, until Jo chased him away. The next morning Dean wasn't in the back room, wasn't in the bar, and she closed her eyes, thinking where to look next. Dreading what she would find.

She found him on the ground in the dirt lot out back of the roadhouse, struggling through a series of sit-ups. The front of his clothes were coated in a layer of brown dust, like he'd already done push-ups, and when he opened his eyes she thought he looked like he was maybe thinking about staying alive for the first time since Sam died.

When he finally left, drove off down the road in that old Chevy, he looked a mile better than he had when he drove in. He'd set himself a training regimen, and no surprise that John Winchester's boy knew how to train. He got his color back, started to fill out again, but still he moved like a man who'd lost an arm and couldn't quite find his balance without it.

When he drove off, she turned away, walked back into the bar and started cleaning glasses again. The pain in the pit of her stomach told her that boy was driving out into the world to find something to take him out of it, take him like this dangerous world had already taken the rest of his family. She'd seen that look in the face of enough men to recognize it looking back at her.

~~~

A few months later, the loud old Chevy pulled back into her lot, stirring dry dirt under its tires. When he walked inside and held the door open behind him she thought for a moment that he'd got himself a girl, or a partner. When he let the door swing shut she thought he'd found himself some more trouble like he'd had before, maybe worse.

She jerked her head up at the sound of light feet padding over the old floorboards and saw a black and white cat, of all things on the earth and off of it, shadowing Dean Winchester's footsteps.

"What the hell is that," Jo asked. "Your seeing eye cat?"

Dean glared at her, but Ellen could see that he looked better than he had when he left. He wasn't the same man Ellen had met in this room a few years ago, with a swagger in his step and his brother at his side. That man was dead, sure as the rest of the Winchesters, but the man in front of her was alive nonetheless.

"Just this cat," Dean said, glancing down at the animal winding itself around his ankles. "Can't get rid of it. Kinda got used to her now."

Ellen almost said something about no pets allowed, but she had a feeling that Dean would walk right back out with his cat and drive away again. Might not hurt anything to have an animal around for a couple days. When Dean sat down to talk to Ash, that cat curled up on his lap like it belonged there, and goddamn if that wasn't a smile on Dean's face. Didn't last long, but it was there, and for the first time she let herself hope that he wasn't just hunting down his own death.

From across the room, she could hear the cat purring, rumbling like the engine of another car driving up to her roadhouse.


End file.
